Russian Provocations Increase Against NATO

Russia is provoking Poland on purpose to see how NATO will respond. From Popular Mechanics:

NATO and allied jets have scrambled more than 100 times this year in response to Russian military sorties. This activity is growing more dramatic. Within the last week, NATO intercepted four groups of Russian aircraft. “These sizable Russian flights represent an unusual level of air activity over European airspace,” the alliance said in a statement.

When the planes at Łask jump into action, it’s called a Quick Reaction Alert, or QRA. Lt. Col. Ireneusz “Palm” Nowak, the base commander at Łask, says that while the Russians keep to their own airspace, the Poles scramble fighters to shadow them whenever they come near. Sometimes, Nowak says, Russian aircraft cruise right up to the Polish border in what professionals call RECCE missions — reconnaissance endeavors meant to test the enemy’s readiness.

[…]

Because they can’t match the Russians plane-for-plane, the Poles look to the United States for help. The U.S. has responded with an increased presence, but the American warplanes here arrive unarmed. They’re here to train the Poles, not fight alongside them.

There’s also a report from the European Leadership Network describing “almost 40 sensitive incidents that have occurred over the last eight months. The locations of the majority of these are graphically represented in the map in Appendix A. These events form a highly disturbing picture of violations of national airspace, emergency scrambles, narrowly avoided mid-air collisions, close encounters at sea, and other dangerous actions happening on a regular basis over a very wide geographical area. While the majority of the documented incidents have taken place in the Baltic Sea, there have also been ‘near misses’ in the High North, Black Sea and along the U.S. and Canadian borders.”

The regular news media are paying little attention to this. (Perhaps because no one is shooting at anyone over Poland.) So we’re learning about this in Popular Mechanics—hardly a foreign policy magazine.

The war in Eastern Ukraine has also dropped off the screen, more or less, thanks most likely to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, but not entirely.

This is unfortunate, not because we’re about to enter a new Cold War—we aren’t—or because Russia is planning an invasion of Poland—it isn’t—but because Russia, like ISIS, is determined to disrupt the international order and scare everyone else into giving it a free pass to do whatever it wants militarily within its self-declared sphere of influence.

Which wouldn’t be a problem necessarily if Russia were a responsible power like, say, France, which unilaterally invaded Mali to take out a proto Al Qaeda state in the north. Russia is acting more like a hegemonic 19^th century power. Its ideology is much less extreme than that of ISIS, of course, but its size and its strength are orders of magnitude greater. The amount of pain and disruption Russia can cause if it wants is enormous.

It’s tempting sometimes to think we’ve moved beyond that stage in our history, but Vladimir Putin and his sometimes violent supporters have not.